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Pizza Brutality: Police Devour Protesters’ Pies

First there was pepper spray. Then came the batons. But on Thursday night, bad relations between the police and protesters entered a new dimension. While arrested demonstrators sat in their cells at a Lower East side station house, the police, protesters say, stole their pizza and drank all their soda pop.

“NYPD Sadistically Eats Pizzas Meant for World AIDS Day Occupy Wall St. Protesters,” read the headline on the protesters’ news release about the episode.

The police concede that they ate the pizza, but said they thought the pies were intended for them.

“Any way you slice it, it was an honest mistake,” said Paul J. Browne, the head police spokesman.

On Thursday — World AIDS Day — eight marchers in Robin Hood costumes were arrested for lying down in Broadway near City Hall while demanding a tax on the rich to pay for AIDS research.

They were taken to the Seventh Precinct station house on Pitt Street. Supporters from the advocacy group Housing Works ordered two large pies — “from the revered pizzeria Mini Munchies, which earned four and a half stars on menupages.com,” the news release noted.

They were delivered to the station house, but not to the prisoners. “We could see the empty pizza boxes in the trash,” Charles King, Housing Works’ chief executive and one of those arrested, said in a statement.

When the protesters confronted the officers, Mr. King said, the officers “just smiled and laughed at us and didn’t deny it.” Also missing in the fray: one-liter bottles of Sprite and Coke.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, explained that the officers “began to consume pizza delivered at the desk in the mistaken belief that Task Force officers had ordered it for their fellow officers, a common practice when outside units make arrests in another command.”

In any case, Mr. Browne said, “prisoner meals must be provided by the department itself,” not by outsiders — for the prisoners’ own safety.

The officers, both parties agree, offered to order replacement pizza. But the prisoners refused — because it was late, and out of principle, said David Thorpe, a Housing Works spokesman.

As to the honest-mistake explanation, Mr. Thorpe pronounced it “laughable.”

“They were smug about having pulled a joke on the activists,” he said. “They can say they’re sorry now, but their actions at the time say something else.”

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